Snowden’s Email Service to Let Users Download Messages

Lavabit, the shuttered encrypted email service once used by Edward Snowden, will give users a short window to archive their old data.

Lavabit users have a three-day window ending at 8 p.m. ET on Thursday to reset their passwords, the company announced in a blog post. They then will have a brief period to download and archive the data from their once-secret email accounts.

The move marks the latest turn in a cat-and-mouse game between law enforcement and the Internet’s leave-no-trace crowd, following a summer of leaks on the government’s digital eavesdropping abilities.

Lavabit, a once obscure Dallas webmail client, became famous this summer following news reports that Snowden used it to contact reporters and privacy activists. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, meantime, asked the company founder Ladar Levison for the encryption keys to unlock all Lavabit messages, according to recently unsealed court filings.

Levison said he was only willing to turn over data on a single user — apparently Snowden, in this case. (The name of the target is redacted in court filings. But the charges and timing match up with the FBI’s investigation into the former NSA contractor.) After a drawn out legal battle, Levison abruptly shuttered the email service in August after giving the federal government the keys.

The FBI didn’t immediately return a request for comment on the latest developments.

The problem: The move left a lot of people, including Levison, without access to their primary email accounts. “I used my Lavabit email account for 10 years,” he says in the blog post. “It was my only email account.”

Lavabit is able to offer new access to its data because it has obtained a new encryption — or secure sockets layer — key, according to the blog post. So-called SSL certificates are used online to prove information is being sent securely. (Most browsers show you’re using SSL with a lock symbol at the beginning of a URL.)

The post makes no mention of Lavabit users being able to send and receive new emails. “The website will then allow users to access email archives and their personal account data so that it may be preserved by the user,” the post says.

In a recent interview, Levison said he didn’t delete customers’ information after wiping it from Lavabit’s servers because it could have been used to justify an obstruction of justice charge. Instead, he put their encrypted information on separate external storage drives before dropping off the keys. “It would have been illegal for me to destroy the data,” he said in the interview.